Marketing automation is becoming more central to CRM efforts. With marketing automation, businesses are becoming more personalized in their approach, more mobile friendly and the technology is more effectively used.

Of these trends, personalization is perhaps the most important. This is part of a broader trend toward personalization that is taking over marketing in general. The focus is shifting from a generalized customer to as specific a customer as possible.

Customers have come to expect this trend and tend to respond much better to personalized approaches. More general pitches aimed at “to whom it may concern” are progressively less effective in this new environment.

Almost as ineffective are messages where the personalization consists only of the customer’s name. You want your messages to reflect a deeper knowledge of the customer than that. Needless to say, you don’t want to get overly personal. That crosses the line to cyber-stalking, as does tracking customers who don’t want to be tracked. But you want to demonstrate at least some knowledge of the customer and the customer’s interests.

Of course CRM makes it easy to personalize messages to existing customers and prospects. To personalize messages to new customers you have to get more creative, relying on things like social media for information you can use to personalize your approach.

The most fruitful area for personalization is areas of interest. If you can figure out what the customer is interested in about your product or service, you can use that information to target your message to the customer. Such targeting is especially useful in generating responses to email marketing campaigns.

Personalizing messages takes more time – although not much more with the benefits of a good CRM system – but it pays big dividends in customer response.

Mobility friendliness is another major trend in marketing automation. As more and more people go mobile, smart marketers are not only building mobility into their apps, they are figuring out how to makes their applications more comfortable and useful for mobile users.

This includes using features to pinpoint the customer’s location and the distance to the nearest brick-and-mortar store, if any. It also includes offering modified screens that are smartphone friendly and making icons are large enough to be read easily on the smaller screens.

Increasingly, the fundamental assumption built into marketing automation applications is that the user is mobile. Rather than adapting desktop applications for mobile use, mobile applications will be adapted to the desktop.

Finally, as marketing automation becomes more common, more companies are figuring how to adapt marketing automation to their businesses. Marketing automation in a powerful tool for CRM, but most people are only now getting familiar with it. As the familiarity grows new applications will be developed and new uses will be found for the technology.

Marketing automation is a rapidly growing tool for customer management and as companies adopt it and adapt it to their needs, it will become ever more powerful and ever more tightly integrated into the CRM function.

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Rick has been involved with computers since the days of punch cards and magnetic drum memories. He's written hundreds of articles on computers and related technology as well as a series of fantasy novels full of bad computer jokes.